How did Pablo Picasso do it? Art historians have spent much time and many words answering that question, but in the video above, you can watch the painter in the act of creation — or, rather, you can watch a series of his paintings as they come into being, evolving from spare but evocative collections of marker strokes into complete images, alive with color. We see Picasso’s visual ideas emerge, and then we see him refine and revise them, sometimes toward a surprising result. All of this happens in under two minutes, since filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot shot the artist working with time-lapse photography, compressing each creative process into mere seconds.

This particular sequence became the trailer of Clouzot’s 1956 documentary The Mystery of Picasso. The paintings in it, we read at the end, “cannot be seen anywhere else. They were destroyed upon completion of the film.” Though word on the street has it that one or two of them may actually survive somewhere today, the idea of Picasso paintings existing only on film does capture the imagination, and it moved the French government to officially declare The Mystery of Picasso a national treasure. Picasso had, of course, painted on film before, as you might recall from seeing us feature Paul Haesaerts’ 1950 Visite à Picasso.

great again ! People think it is simple, but it iss not at all. One should always have in mind that P was a master with 17 already and then looked for something new. Go to Barcelona to know that. Or take up a book with pics of young Picasso.

“When I was young, like all the young, art, great art, was my religion; but with the years, I came to see that art, as it was understood until 1800; was henceforth finished, on its last legs, doomed, and that so-called artistic activity with all its abundance is only the manyformed manifestation of its agony. Men are detached from and more and more disinterested in painting, sculpture and poetry; appearances to the contrary, men today have put their hearts into everything else; the machine, scientific discoveries, wealth, the domination of natural forces and immense territories. We no longer feel art as a vital need, as a spiritual necessity, as was the case in centuries past. / Many of us continue to be artists and to be occupied with art for reasons which have little in common with true art, but rather through a spirit of imitation, through nostalgia for tradition, through mere inertia, through love of ostentation, of prodigality, of intellectual curiosity, through fashion or through calculation. They live still through force of habit and snobbery in a recent past, but the great majority in all places no longer have any sincere passion for art, which they consider at most as a diversion, a hobby and a decoration. Little by little, new generations with a predilection for mechanics and sports, more sincere, more cynical and brutal, will leave art to the museums and libraries as an incomprehensible and useless relic of the past. / From the moment that art is no longer the sustenance that nourishes the best, the artist may exteriorize his talent in all sorts of experiments with new formulas, in endless caprices and fancy, in all the expedients of intellectual charlatanism. In the arts, people no longer seek consolation, nor exaltation. But the refined, the rich, the indolent, distillers of quintessence seek the new, the unusual, the original, the extravagant, the shocking. And I, since cubism and beyond, I have satisfied these gentlemen and these critics with all the various whims which have entered my head, and the less they understood them, the more they admired. By amusing myself at these games, at all these tomfoolery’s, at all these brain-busters, riddles and arabesques, I became famous quite rapidly. And celebrity means for a painter: sales increment, money, wealth. / Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when completely alone with myself, I haven’t the nerve to consider myself an artist in the great and ancient sense of the word. There have been great painters like Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time. This is a bitter confession, mine, more painful indeed than it may seem, but it has the merit of being sincere.” – Pablo Picasso (In ORIGIN 12, 1964)

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.